Free Blue Light by Walter Mosley Page B

after Coyote’s warning that I couldn’t do anything. But now I have survived.” Ordé brought his hands together right between his eyes so that his fingers pointed up toward his forehead.
    “Coyote’s message? That’s what you got out of my blood?” I asked.
    “We are no longer mechanical pieces of flesh, Chance. Not just a heart to pump blood or a brain to translate primitive signals. Our blood and bone and flesh sing out the whole world that might be.”
    I wasn’t in the mood for a sermon right then. I wanted answers but I knew that Ordé wasn’t so easily pinned down.
    “If I feel something,” he continued, “or perceive something, if I learn something in any way — that knowledge is everywhere in me. I am more than a part of the whole; I am potentially everything. That’s why I can taste what has happened in blood.”
    “So who killed Phyllis?” Reggie asked.
    That’s when Ordé told us the story of what he called Gray Man; how Horace LaFontaine died of cancer but was then resurrected in blue light. How he went out in the desert and hibernated in a cave for almost four years.
    “He is Death,” Ordé said. “And Death seeks its own.”
    “He wants to kill us?” Reggie asked.
    Ordé nodded. Then he said, “It was written in Phyllis’s blood because she fought Gray Man, she made him bleed that thick lifeless blood of his. She knew his story before she died.”
    Ordé took a small folding knife from his pocket and pricked the tip of his right forefinger. A tiny drop of red appeared from the cut. He held the finger out to me.
    “Taste this and see what I’ve seen.”
    “Died?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Ordé replied. “It was true death. His hands ended her body’s life, and his essence extinguished her light.”

Six
    I WAS UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE I knew I was falling. After tasting that salty drop of blood, I was in another place. Many of Ordé’s memories became my own, including the story of Gray Man.
    On the night that blue light struck, the corpse that had once been Horace LaFontaine staggered, skinny as a rail and barely dressed, up into the hills. He walked through fences and over large stones, pushed down small trees when they stood in his way. His bones crackled from the electricity he’d sucked out of the wall of his once-sister’s home.
    The human thoughts in his mind, all the memories of the life of the man who once bore a name, were now like specimens in glass jars in a great laboratory of death.
    As he made his way through dense foliage, blood-hungry night insects came at him. But before any of them could alight, cold blue electricity ignited them in the air.
    He made his way like that, false fireflies dying around him as he went, perverted blue light inside and out. Walking death seeking its own company. Unbridled potential with no life to temper it.
    He went north dimly aware of a coyote that stalked him. Her nose close to the ground. Her quick feet ready to run. He couldn’t catch her, but then again, if she came within rock-throwing distance, she would die. Both were aware of the limits of their power. The coyote had witnessed blue light that night also. Now she smelled the unnatural odors that fumed around Horace LaFontaine. She tracked him as a scientist might follow the path of a celestial body that has, for no known reason, altered its course.
    She sniffed the air and then licked the ground he walked on. All her senses cried out. She yipped and howled, but her warnings about Gray Man went unheard.
    Three days later, far up a slope that was the beginning of a long meandering decline into the northern desert, Gray Man found his cave. In some cubicle of Horace’s mind he had gleaned the story of another man who died and came back to life. The man was buried in an underground chamber, behind a great boulder.
    There was a stone above the cave. Gray Man climbed in, digging into the earth under the stone with hardened nails. From far off, the coyote watched, remembering the placement